Professional Web design for everybody

BEYOND HTML

The task of setting up a Web page keeps getting easier. If you’re a Linux user, you can choose from a variety of Linux-friendly HTML editing tools. But once you craft the headlines, format the text, and build in a few nice pictures, you may want to take your Web creations in a new direction. In this issue, we’ll show you tools for taking your Web designs beyond the ordinary HTML. For readers who are ready for a big step into the world of professional design, our first cover story article shows how you can set up your own online store using the Open Source osCommerce application. Another article looks at how you can extend and simplify your Web pages using Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets give your sites a professional look and feel – and you don’t have to be a programmer or Web guru to achieve this stylish appearance. The next article, “Painting your Site: Web page layouts with the GIMP,” describes a technique for laying out graphics-rich Web pages with the GIMP image editor and converting the result to HTML. In our final cover story article “Flash in Linux,” we discuss Linux tools for adding Flash animations to your Web pages.

Modern websites bear little resemblence to their legacy predecessors. We’ll show you why the new web is different and how you can benefit from the system of technologies we know collectively as Web 2.0.